Unlikely Allies Join Execution Foes at Prison

As Robert Alton Harris approached his fate Monday, David Magris and Dennis Tapp, the unlikeliest of allies, made their way here from Oakland to stand together at the prison gate and mourn the expected execution.

Magris, the assistant director of operations for an East Bay design firm, was on San Quentin’s Death Row in the early 1970s. He had shot a man to death and partially paralyzed another.

Tapp, who lives in Oregon, is the man he left crippled.

They came to San Quentin to speak against the death penalty, joining a small crowd of anguished death penalty opponents who gathered outside the prison’s main gate as darkness fell, braced for an event they had dreaded for years: the resumption of executions in California.

It is a dread that Magris still finds suffocatingly familiar.

In 1969, he went on a 21st-birthday crime rampage, robbing two gas stations. Tapp, then 26, was working at a gas station in Vallejo. Magris shot him in the middle of the back. Tapp was hospitalized for months, spent 10 years learning how to walk without canes, still limps and lives on a disability check.

And without a drop of drama in his voice he says he has nothing against Magris. Never did.

“No grudges, no regrets,” Tapp said Monday. “I don’t believe in holding a grudge over something that happened a long time ago. It’s easier on me. I sleep better. . . . I’d always been against capital punishment. When I first heard David had been sentenced to death it floored me. It caused arguments with some of my friends.”

Tapp and Magris, who were reconciled on a network TV show five years ago, joined a wide variety of death penalty opponents Monday, including three dozen who marched 21 miles from San Francisco.

Magris left Death Row in 1972, after nearly three years, when California’s death penalty law was ruled unconstitutional. Paroled in 1985, he began working with a Northern California coalition against capital punishment, which he now heads.

“This (execution) is totally immoral,” Magris said. “The judge who sentenced me (to death) said: ‘You have no redeemable qualities.’ That was enough to turn me around. I wasn’t such a bad guy in my family’s eyes. You can’t say people don’t have any redeemable qualities.”

Arguments about the death penalty were heard all along Main Street in San Quentin Village, a neighborhood of four dozen homes that leads to the prison. A Marin County schoolteacher brought his students here as part of a classroom debate on capital punishment. The father of a woman murdered by a man on Death Row came with a sign that said “Justice for Victims” and stood quietly near the main gate, telling reporters he will continue suffering until her killer died.

Law enforcement authorities discouraged a large turnout by banning virtually all parking within two miles of San Quentin. Still, several hundred opponents of the death penalty--and a small number of death penalty advocates--were expected to hike to the prison by midnight.

A San Francisco-to-San Quentin march Monday by anti-death penalty protesters drew only a small turnout--in part, organizers said, because a federal judge’s injunction delaying the execution was not overturned until nearly midnight Sunday.

Hoisting signs reading “Don’t Kill In My Name,” and walking under bright sunny skies, the marchers were met by honks of support from motorists interspersed with catcalls as they trekked across the Golden Gate Bridge and past the rolling hills of Marin County.

“I’m upset at all the obscenities hurled at us all day,” said one marcher, Janice Gay, wife of a Death Row inmate. “Our society is so unforgiving and hateful. It hurts.”

Another marcher, Sue Wallace of San Francisco, said: “I just feel very strongly about the sanctity of life. . . . This makes people that we go by stop and think about the issue.”